Territorial Expansion in the Early Republic

British colonists were fiercely ambitious about the future of their settlements. The colonial charters of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia laid claim to lands to the Pacific, ignoring other European powers on the continent as well as the Native American residents of those lands.

That there was something special in the rapid growth of the young nation appeared clear to early national leaders. The fact that the white population of the United States doubled between 1770 and 1790 was a cause for celebration among nationalists who believed that the nation's physical increase would help it compete with the European powers that threatened on every side. As president, Thomas Jefferson suggested the United States might become an “empire of liberty,” expanding its beneficial sway far to the west. Even in the early years of the republic, many Americans accepted the continued expansion of the nation as both natural and inevitable, particularly given the supposedly inferior racial composition, religious practices, and social systems of other North American residents, from Indian people to the French and Spanish Catholics who claimed lands south and west of British settlement.

Indeed, virtually everything about their young nation—from its admirable origins in New England religious settlements through its astounding population growth, miraculous victory over the great British Empire during the Revolution, racial and religious superiority over other residents of the continent, and novel form of government—proved to US citizens that their nation, above all others, was unique and marked by God for a special destiny.

But there was little that was natural or predestined about the process of terri­torial expansion. Even before the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided for the settlement and governance of federal lands west of the Appalachians, settlers ille­gally occupied the region and expected their new government to provide protection from resident Indian people, something the British had often been unwilling to do. But the vast majority of Americans felt strongly that a standing army was a distinct threat to a republic, and as a result the US Army was initially an insignificant and distrusted force, allowed to grow no larger than 700 men. The resident tribes in the Old Northwest refused to vacate their lands northwest of the Ohio River, repeatedly rejecting treaties they considered illegitimate. The need for a stronger military pres­ence on the frontier drove the expansion of the army to 5,000 in 1792. After years of warfare and the continued failure of treaty negotiations with a confederacy of Northwest tribes, including Iroquois, Hurons, Shawnees, and Delaware, President George Washington directed US forces to subdue them militarily. Defeat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 drove Indian people in the Old Northwest to cede two-thirds of Ohio and a portion of Indiana in the Treaty of Greenville. Although the US Army was, by this point, an established presence in the Old Northwest, as in other newly won territories, political governance west of the Appalachians was weak, and particularly close to the northern border, Indians, Canadians, and American settlers interacted and traded in ways that did not always conform with American law.^[2318]

President Thomas Jefferson took a dramatic step toward his empire of liberty when he purchased the vast trans-Mississippi region (828,000 square miles) from France in 1803 for 15 million dollars. Jefferson had no explicit constitutional authority to purchase land on behalf of the United States.

Jefferson’s opponents in the Federalist Party objected to the purchase not only on partisan grounds, but because they imagined a host of dangers resulting from territorial growth. History had proven to opponents of territorial growth that large nations were often weak. When a nation shared language, values, and experiences, it prospered. Extended empires—with diverse populations, like that of ancient Rome or modern Britain—fractured and collapsed. Federalists asked how the United States could develop its existing resources when it continued to focus on extending its boundaries. Both Democrats and Federalists were dismissive of the “inferior” Catholic and racially mixed inhabitants of the trans-Mississippi West, but Federalists worried that those inhabitants would prove impossible to integrate into America’s political, economic, and social systems. Democracy might collapse under the weight of these potentially corruptible voters.^[2320]

Democrats, who believed that democracy and economic progress would re­sult from the widespread acquisition and distribution of land, shared few of these reservations. Jefferson was confident that “no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government.”^[2321] The blessings of the American way of life could easily be extended, and the vaster America’s ter­ritory, the less likely it seemed to Democrats that foreign powers would threaten America. This division between supporters and opponents of expansionism would continue to animate partisan politics. Until the late 1850s, Democrats continued to champion expansionism in aggressive terms, and their political opponents repeated warnings that growth would lead to internal weakness and national collapse.

Federalists might have been content were the residents of Louisiana treated as colonial subjects, with limited rights.

The Louisiana Purchase ultimately doubled the size of the United States and set a precedent for presidential action in the interests of expansion. But equally signifi­cant was Jefferson’s recognition that the purchase did not guarantee US sovereignty. Jefferson’s party believed in limited federal power, and the new president reduced the strength of the army upon entering office. Not only was federal power extremely weak in newly annexed territories, the exact boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase were hardly clear in 1803. The United States asserted that they extended to present- day Texas and portions of New Mexico. Spain claimed it covered only a small strip of land west of the Mississippi. And England openly questioned the legality of the purchase. By directing Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest, Jefferson laid claim to this disputed area. Far from being manifest, America’s territorial destiny was still opaque in the early nineteenth century.^[2322]

Increasing numbers of settlers would make their way to the newly discovered Oregon Territory in coming decades, but immediately following the Louisiana Purchase, it was lands adjacent to the incorporated portions of the United States that appealed most to land-hungry citizens and Democratic politicians. On the southern border of Georgia lay Spanish Florida. To the north of an ill-defined border lay British Canada, full of former loyalists who fled the American colonies during the Revolution. Given the lack of political representation that Canadians enjoyed relative to Americans, many New Englanders in particular believed Canada ripe for revolution and annexation.

When the United States declared war against England in 1812, expansionists in the North and the South grabbed what appeared to be a perfect opportunity to in­crease their security and further their dominion. Their hopes were thwarted when attempted American invasions of Canada were rebuffed at the border. General Andrew Jackson held Spain responsible for a British-led attack out of Pensacola on an American fort in Mobile Bay, and used the pretext to invade Spanish Florida. But he was forced to withdraw to protect New Orleans from British assault. The War of 1812 ended with America's territorial boundaries with other European powers unchanged, although victories over Native American tribes in the West and South dramatically increased lands available to US settlement. The death of Tecumseh and the destruction of his confederacy in 1813 opened up land from what is now Indiana to Wisconsin to US expansion, while Andrew Jackson's victory over the powerful Creek tribe in the Southeast enabled Americans to settle half of Alabama and part of southern Georgia. The war also justified a further increase in the size and authority of the army. In 1815, Congress authorized a force of over 12,000 men, newly organized, as well as a systematized program of costal fortification.^[2324]

In 1818 Jackson again invaded Spanish Florida, under pretense of protecting American settlers there from runaway slaves harbored by the Seminole Tribe. In the eighteenth century, Spain had been the most powerful empire in the New World. But revolutionary movements across Latin America, combined with finan­cial difficulties at home, left the Spanish with little power to protect their North American interests.

The peacetime army faced one final decrease in size, in 1821, but because expanding boundaries and new frontiers required maintenance, protection, and institutional stability, the army otherwise continued to grow. During an era of ex­tremely limited federal government, the military provided the prime source of stability on the frontier. Throughout the century, territorial expansion drove an increase in the size of the army, and army officers, in particular, were often avid expansionists.^[2327]

Territorial expansionism in the early American republic was impressive in its scope but somewhat haphazard. While a few committed nationalists contemplated the annexation of Canada and dreamed of an American settlement on the Pacific, there was no national consensus before the 1830s regarding the future of the nation's boundaries. Many Americans, particularly in the Northeast, thought the nation was already large enough. US military engagements were, at least on the sur­face, defensive in character and driven by security concerns. Early expansion lacked both the national coordination and ambition it would later exhibit. But expansion before 1830 set a number of precedents that would shape the dramatic events of coming decades.